Beautiful credit! The foundation of modern society. Who shall say that this is not the golden age of mutual trust, of unlimited re...liance upon human promises? That is a peculiar condition of society which enables a whole nation to instantly recognize point and meaning in the familiar newspaper anecdote, which puts into the mouth of a distinguished speculator in lands and mines this remark:M"I wasn't worth a cent two years ago, and now I owe two millions of dollars."LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »

Industrial man--a sentient reciprocating engine having a fluctuating output, coupled to an iron wheel revolving with uniform veloc...ity. And then we wonder why this should be the golden age of revolution and mental derangement.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »

Scientists tend to be ... Utopian in temperament--to believe in the possibility in principle, perhaps even in fact, of a different... and altogether better world. The great days of Utopian thinking were the days when voyages of discovery on the earth's surface had the same significance as space travel has today. The old Utopias--New Atlantis, Christianopolis and the City of the Sun--were faraway contemporary societies, but the Utopias men dream of today lie in the distant future or on a planet of a distant faraway sun. Arcadian thinking looks not forward nor far away but backward to a golden age that could yet return. Arcadia is a world of innocence not yet corrupted by ambition and inquiry, a world of pious acquiescence in the established order of things, without strife and without ambition--a world of "truth and honest living." Milton, whom I quote, saw it as the purpose of education "to repair the ruins of our first parents," to return to the happy innocence of the world before the Fall.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »

The whole body of what is now called moral or ethical truth existed in the golden age as abstract science. Or, if we prefer, we ma...y say that the laws of Nature are the purest morality.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »